Google Webmaster Tools -> Sitemap suddent "indexed" drop
-
Hello MOZ,
We had an massive SEO drop in June due to unknown reasons and we have been trying to recover since then.
I've just noticed this yesterday and I'm worried. See: http://imgur.com/xv2QgCQ
Could anyone help by explaining what would cause this sudden drop and what does this drop translates to exactly?
What is strange is that our index status is still strong at 310 pages, no drop there: http://imgur.com/a1sRAKo
And when I do search on google site:globecar.com everything seems normal see: http://imgur.com/O7vPkqu
Thanks,
-
I found the problem guys, I had made a change in the sitemap that messed up everything. It's all back to normal now. Thanks guys for your support!
-
That is what I was looking for, thank you.
-
I think this is the information everyone is looking for, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemap-index-count-drop-is-a-bug-20608.html It seems there is a bug in GWT with sitemaps.
-
I am having this exact problem, it started on July 14th. For some reason my indexed has dropped even though I have no sitemap errors. Have you received any answers?
-
Totally agree with Andy.
Make sure your XML sitemaps don't contain any errors, and if something like this happens you should closely watch your organic traffic as well. If there's a big drop in your organic traffic you can start worrying
-
That isn't an 'SEO' drop as such, this is related to your sitemap errors. Doing a site: wont show the same numbers as you see as being shown on the sitemap itself.
Rebuild your sitemap, correct the errors and then see what state it is in.
-Andy
-
Hey,
First of all you don't need to worry about. Be calm and find out the root cause.
Usually when this happen, we investigate things in bit depth. I can't give you the accurate answer before seeing the details. Please checkout the below pointers and let us know your thoughts.
- Your marketing activities followed the same pace? May be, your competitors outranked you by producing more valuable links and pages.
- Did you check the analytics? It'd be better for us if you could share the analytics traffic graph.
- Have you done any major changes to your website in terms of design, technical things, content, URLs, shift to another platform etc?
- Have you just recovered from any penalty in recent past? Check your WMT again.
- Did you agency/team build new links in this time period? If yes, examine them.
Find out the best possible answer of above points and I'm sure you will get the clearer picture of this mishap.
Hope this helps!
Umar
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Decreased organic traffic but increased Webmaster Tool Queries
We have a client who has had a significant decrease in organic traffic this last month (about 20%) but in Webmaster tools it tells me there was an increase in impressions and clicks. How can these both be accurate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Pagination and matching title tags - does it matter when using rel="prev" and "next" attributes?
I'm looking at a site with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place, to deal with pagination. However, the pages in each paginated category have identical page titles - is this an issue? Rand gives an example of how he'd vary page titles here, to prevent problems, though I'm not entirely sure whether this advice applies to sites with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience Any advice would be welcome - many thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Hreflang Tags with Errors in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Google Webmaster tools is giving me errors with Hreflang tags that I can't seem to figure out... I've double checked everything: all the alternate and canonical tags, everything seems to match yet Google finds errors. Can anyone help? International Targeting | Language > 'fr' - no return tags
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar
URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'fr' that do not have return tags.
Status: 7/10/15
24 Hreflang Tags with Errors Please see attached pictures for more info... Thanks, Karim KQgb3Pn0 -
Removing Parameterized URLs from Google Index
We have duplicate eCommerce websites, and we are in the process of implementing cross-domain canonicals. (We can't 301 - both sites are major brands). So far, this is working well - rankings are improving dramatically in most cases. However, what we are seeing in some cases is that Google has indexed a parameterized page for the site being canonicaled (this is the site that is getting the canonical tag - the "from" page). When this happens, both sites are being ranked, and the parameterized page appears to be blocking the canonical. The question is, how do I remove canonicaled pages from Google's index? If Google doesn't crawl the page in question, it never sees the canonical tag, and we still have duplicate content. Example: A. www.domain2.com/productname.cfm%3FclickSource%3DXSELL_PR is ranked at #35, and B. www.domain1.com/productname.cfm is ranked at #12. (yes, I know that upper case is bad. We fixed that too.) Page A has the canonical tag, but page B's rank didn't improve. I know that there are no guarantees that it will improve, but I am seeing a pattern. Page A appears to be preventing Google from passing link juice via canonical. If Google doesn't crawl Page A, it can't see the rel=canonical tag. We likely have thousands of pages like this. Any ideas? Does it make sense to block the "clicksource" parameter in GWT? That kind of scares me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Is it better to not allow Google to index my Tumblr Blog?
Currently using a subdomain for my blog via Tumblr In my seo reports I see alot of errors. Mostly from the Tumblr blog. Made change so there are unique titles and tags. Too many errors I am wondering if it is best to just not allow it to be indexed via tumblr control panel. It certainly is doing a great job with engagement and social network follows, but i'm starting to wonder if and how much it is penalizing my domain.. Appreciate your input.. By the way this theme is not flash for the content very basic single a theme...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810